Ferdinand de Saussure, Course on
General Linguistics
Saussure communicates ideas, and thus the central question for him becomes
the nature of the sugn: what gives it its identity and enables it to function
as a sign. He argues that signs are arbitrary and conventional and that
each is defined not by essential properties but by the differences that
distinguish it from other signs. [Thus, the question of what can be a sign
is raised. In visual arts the sign is often of various qualities: a visual
representation of object (with or without allegorical significance), a
stylistic mark or characteristic brushstroke, a mode of production framing
a work, a simple mark on a page (as in Robert Ryman's work)]. A language
is thus conceived as a system of differences, and this leads to the development
of the distinctions on which structuralism and semiotics have relied: between
a language that is a system of difference (langue) and the speech events
which the system makes possible (parole), between the study of language
as a system at any given time (synchronic) and study of correlations between
elements from different historical periods (diachronic), between two types
of differences within the system, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations,
and between the two constituents of the sign, signifier and signified.
The proposed systematic nature of language is what allows Saussure to exclude
such ineffective utterences as sound itself. Sound does not belong to the
system; it permits the manifestation of units of the system in acts of
speech (it is the simple medium, or what provides the possiblity of communication
- an action). Indeed Saussure concludes that "in the linguistic system
there are only differences, without positive terms." This radical view
attacks the commonplace notion that language consists of words, positive
entities, which are put together to form a system and thus acquire relations
with one another, but Saussure's analysis of the nature of linguistic units
leads to the conclusion that, on the contrary, signs are the product of
a system of differences; indeed, they are not positive entities at all
but effects of difference. "The idea or phonic substance that sign contains
is of less importance that the other signs that surround it. Proof of this
is that the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning
or its sound being affected, solely because a neighboring term has been
modified." CoGL, pg. 120)
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